Kill Your Old Ideas to Get More Creative
I “wrote” a TV show about Silicon Valley for ten years. I spent hundreds of hours talking about it, collecting ideas into a giant Evernote file, pondering the soundtrack, but not much time writing it. Because every time I thought I got it over with, I thought of a better version. Over the years, I have adapted my unwritten pilot project into an unwritten book, film, web series, and comic strip. I chased every idea at once, until the project loomed in my head grandiose and unwieldy. I was accumulating a mountain of ideological debt.
Idea debt is a bunch of ideas that you keep revising but never finish, or even never begin. It can be a book, an application, a business, any project that pops into your head, but not in reality. It seems so much more impressive than the projects you actually do, with all their frustrations and compromises. As screenwriter Craig Mazin puts it, “The most exciting screenplay in the world is the one you’re going to write. The least exciting scenario is the one you are on page 80. ” So this idea debt metastases, threatening to suspend real projects or stop them for so long that they too will become idea debt.
Like financial debt, a small, well-managed ideal debt is great. Think about ideas well, put them aside for later to give yourself more creative possibilities than you are using. But sometimes you need to pay off that debt. Fortunately, you owe yourself to yourself, so you have many options.
Do it now
Take one of your big ideas. How small can you make it? What is the minimum viable product ? Squeeze it until you can polish it in a day, then get down to business. It doesn’t have to be perfect or even good, just made. The next time you dream of a big, beautiful, correct version of that idea, think instead of your actual finished version and how much better the big one is because it exists.
In his 2006 video,Brain Crack, Ze Frank presented his untapped ideas “on a beautiful platter of glitter and rose petals.” To avoid addiction to his brain fissure, Frank said, “When I have an idea, even a bad one, I try to bring it to life as soon as possible.”
Brain Crack was an episode of The Show , Frank’s daily video blog, full of lewd songs, speeches, and snippets. Realizing his ideas led Frank to a successful career in short video; in 2012 he became president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.
Put this in your current project
The writer Ryan North gets a lot of ideas and doesn’t have time for everything; among other things, he is busy writing three strips a week for his webcomic Dinosaur Comics . The problem solves itself, he tells me, “I often get an idea that needs a lot of work, and then I get T-Rex to describe this idea in a comic book (usually, hopefully, with a twist) as a way to scratch this itch.”
North cites Kurt Vonnegut who used erroneous ideas to convey them to his recurring character, the fictional writer Kilgore Trout. Vonnegut said through Trout, “I believe I have now summarized 50 novels that I will never have to write and have saved people from reading them.”
The great thing about this trick is that you can always follow up on the idea later. One strip of dinosaur comics, a sci-fi tale of King Midas , became the Flesh of Midas comic series. A strip about a car that accurately predicts someone else’s cause of death was the inspiration for two anthologies of stories: The Death Machine and It’s How You Die .
Hand it over
One side of the perverse appeal of the idea of debt is that it can seem so good, so dignified, that you just want someone to implement it, whether you are that someone or not. So give your ideas to a nice home.
The easiest way is to post your idea on Twitter (blog or Instagram). If it really is that good, someone else will give it a try. Or post it on the free ideas sharing forum: the ancient and quirky Halfbakery , or the / r / Lightbulb , / r / CrazyIdeas , / r / SomebodyMakeThis , / r / highdeas , / r / AppIdeas, or / r / Startup_Ideas subreddits .
There is only one important rule for this method: it really needs to be given away. This means that you are not selling, renting, or participating in it in any way.
Nobody will pay you anyway. Writer Neil Gaiman says that people approach each author with the same sentence (which he always politely rejects): “They will tell you an idea (the hard part), you write it down and turn it into a novel (the easy part), you two can divide the money fifty by fifty. ” Business ideas are also not for sale. As investor Tim Berry says, “Real people with real ideas benefit from them by building a company to bring those ideas to fruition.” If the Patent Office doesn’t allow you to register it, it’s useless. So don’t pitch your idea to an expert as if you were whispering in the ear of a college graduate, “One word: plastic.” Just get it there, and if the experts want it, they’ll find it.
I recently threw an old idea (modern Romeo and Juliet, narrated as a fictional episode of Planet Money ) on Twitter . I was surprised at how quickly I ran out of thoughts of what seemed like a rich and developed project in my head. I was also surprised when someone who really is an art podcast, sent me an email asking for permission to write this story. (I gave it for free of course. It’s not my idea anymore!) Even without that answer, it was satisfying enough to get a few favorites and responses.
Don’t worry about leaving someone else in charge of your idea; it is not zero-sum. Once you get your idea across, you will feel the pressure slip away. But its new owner will never feel the same responsibility; It is impossible to dwell on someone else’s idea as much as on your own.
Throw it out
After all of the above, what’s left may look good. But most of this will never be done. This is fine! Ideas may seem like pets or children, but they are not; giving up most of them is great. And if your giant idea file (pop science writer Stephen Johnson calls it Spark File ) won’t download you, leave it alone. But if that’s the case, or you just want to clear your head, then take the advice of cartoonist and author Jessica Abel and throw it all away .
You are probably dreading the thought of simply deleting all your old ideas. So instead, make a big gesture: post them. Together. You can tell a little about each of them, or just paste in the raw file. This is a copy of Spark File, Bonfire.
Writer and consultant John Sexton posted all of his unfinished ideas in one big post on Medium – The Pile of Old Ideas – Volume 1 . This is an exciting cascade of ideas: “Your brain is an ideal virtual reality device”, “Enemies of Comedy”, “Taxonomy Farts.” It’s a shame Sexton couldn’t finish any of them. But new ideas will always come.
Inspired by Sexton, Boing Boing editor Rob Beshizza published two dozen unfinished video games in Killing My Unfinished Game Developers Projects . These are fun ideas: a puzzle game based on DNA editing; simulation of the last days of Lenin; a clicker game about blogging; Qbert MMO. “Ideas are cheap,” Beschitza wrote. “If you want, take it. I will applaud from a safe distance! “
There is excitement and pleasure in this approach. This is your great opus! Abandoned ideas are a new idea! However, you need to do it in a day or two. Don’t do what I did, presenting a metaproject that contains all my abandoned ideas that will develop and then give up on that idea. The debt of the meta-idea has a high interest rate.
Make a plan
You will not give up all your ideas. Some are worth holding on to, worth doing. But now that you’ve gotten rid of everything else, you need to get to work. You need to make a plan.
Lifehacker can certainly help you in some way. Here’s how to get motivated ; here’s how to complete a coding project ; here’s how to start a side business ; here’s how to complete the project . Choose a planning system: Getting Things Done , Bullet Journal , Agile development . Choose goals, make a to-do list, and set deadlines.
A couple of years ago, I decided to get down to business and finish a pilot project in Silicon Valley. I set up a schedule, I worked on it daily, and I ended up writing two pilots. I put them aside, came back to them after a month and … they were ok, but not that good and not worth fixing.
I was free. For decades, I dreamed that this would be my best project, and now I have finally put this theory to the test. Despite the fact that I refuted it, I considered it a success: it cleared this part of my mind. I zipped the pilots and the giant Evernote file. And I moved on to the next project – for real.